Water Flow is Crucial

Up until now, we've always fetched water from the nearby village of Lences. There are two points there where we can tap water, and it tastes great.

But it's not practical to keep going to the village, especially since it's not enough to water 120 trees. So, high on our backlog (to-do list) was setting up a water supply.

We have a permit to draw 10 cubic meters of water from the river, which is sufficient for now. Eventually, we want to recycle all the water we use. 

Step one is getting water into the village. Since the river is about 10 meters lower than the village, we laid 600 meters of pipe in the river last holiday. The idea was to use the principle of communicating vessels to get water up to the village without a pump.

I've done this many times before, so I thought it would be a simple task, but no matter what we did, the water didn't come out during the last holiday. That was incredibly frustrating, so the first thing we did when we arrived was to continue working on the water supply.

The only logical explanation was that there was air in the pipe. Apparently, the gradient was so small that there wasn't enough water pressure to push the air out. My experience in the mountains of Italy was that this process was easy, but the gentle slope here made it completely different.

The pump is working and pushing water up the tube

So, my idea that it would sort itself out didn't work. Since our pump couldn't handle air, we couldn't use it to suck the water up. We decided to bring the pump down to the river. Since the pump runs on electricity and our extension cords didn't reach the river, we borrowed Carlos's generator. Bringing this incredibly heavy machine to the river was quite a challenge. Once there, we reversed the pump, so it pumped water up the pipe from the river. If all went well, the air would be pushed up, and the pipe would fill with water.

This worked. After some time pumping, water started to come out of the pipe, although with very little pressure and very slowly. I assumed that the remaining air would eventually come out of the pipe with the water. So, I installed the pump as low as our extension cords would allow. I filled the pipe with buckets of water from the river to prevent the pump from running dry, and after hours of fiddling, the pump finally worked. To our delight, a small stream of water came out at full power!

To distribute the water across the land and village, we ordered 1,500 meters of pipe, which had now arrived. We immediately set to work laying it out everywhere. Maaike's brother, Teun, was kind enough to dig trenches in the road so we could lay the pipes. After a few days, we had quite a network of pipes.

However, the pump kept shutting off periodically, and the water pressure was minimal. So, Maaike and I decided to check for potential issues again. I found it hard to believe there was still air in the pipe and even began to doubt the principle of communicating vessels. 

We checked the beginning of the pipe, in case it was clogged, but it was fine. We then inspected every 100 meters of pipe to see if the water was flowing properly. Each time, we found air in the pipe. Once we released the air, the pressure increased. With every 100 meters, it got better. I also laid the last section of pipe as straight as possible to avoid any spots where air could get trapped.

And yes, after days of work, the water finally reached up to 1 meter below the pump. The pump can handle this well, operating consistently with low energy costs and high pressure! We then connected the filtration system, so we now have clean water and even drinking water. 

 

In the video, you'll see that I hadn't realized the filters had air vents that still needed to be closed. Luckily that was an easy task.